Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Green Team: Rogue Warrior III
Green Team: Rogue Warrior III
Green Team: Rogue Warrior III
Ebook526 pages9 hours

Green Team: Rogue Warrior III

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Richard Marcinko's revelations in his explosive #1 bestselling autobiography, Rogue Warrior, reverberated through the highest levels of the US government. But, bound by government restrictions, he was forbidden to tell the whole story. The answer was fiction. First came Rogue Warrior: Red Cell, the take-no-prisoners bestseller with Marcinko as hero. Now the Rogue Warrior's back and he's hotter than ever, in a knockout novel of courage and nonstop action.

In Portsmouth, England, an aircraft carrier has been sabotaged, killing the American Chief of Naval Operations, one of the few friends the Rogue Warrior had left in the Navy. Marcinko discovers a holy war is brewing—a violent religious movement, encircling the globe and zeroing in on the West. Defeating that menace will be the supreme test of Marcinko's GREEN TEAM, a top-secret unit operating outside the U.S. military's chain of command. But in Washington, the political wolves select Dick Marcinko as their sacrificial lamb. For the Rogue Warrior it's time to declare a holy war of his own.

The enemy may have the ultimate weapon, but GREEN TEAM has Marcinko's Tenth Commandment of SpecWar: There Are No Rules —Thou Shalt Win at All Cost!
LanguageEnglish
PublisherPocket Books
Release dateNov 24, 2009
ISBN9781439187944
Green Team: Rogue Warrior III
Author

Richard Marcinko

Richard Marcinko was a US Navy SEAL commander and Vietnam War veteran. He was the first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six. After retiring from the navy, he became an author, radio host, military consultant, and motivational speaker. He is the author of The Rogue Warrior®’s Strategy for Success: A Commando’s Principles of Winning, and the New York Times business bestseller Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior: A Commando’s Guide to Success. In addition to his bestselling autobiography, Rogue Warrior, he coauthored with John Weisman the New York Times bestselling novels Rogue Warrior: Red Cell, Rogue Warrior: Green Team, Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue, Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold, Rogue Warrior: Seal Force Alpha, Rogue Warrior: Option Delta, and Rogue Warrior: Echo Platoon. He died on December 25, 2021.

Read more from Richard Marcinko

Related to Green Team

Titles in the series (5)

View More

Related ebooks

General Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Green Team

Rating: 3.473684157894737 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

38 ratings2 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    My longest posts are always the ones I liked the least.I'm pretty sure this is the worst book I've read this year at least. Oh my god, it's just packed full of testosterone laden drivel. It's not that he's a macho doofus, I'm a macho doofus. It's that they are painfully juvenile. This is the way it works. Dick Marchencko was a SEAL and did all these tough guy things. No problem. Sounds like the Yank version of Andy Mcnab. However, this series is Dick writing a fictional men's adventure series, like Remo Williams the Destroyer, or Mack Bolan the Executioner (both of which I have read an embarrassingly large amount of, so I'm not new to the realm of men's adventure fiction) except Dick is writing himself as a fictional character. To me, this is just daft as bats.So this whole real person/fictional person thing is weird enough, but they are also written really really badly. They are a lot like the adventure fiction I wrote when I was in high school and I was able to rebel on paper by killing a lot of fictional characters and writing "fuckwad" a lot. Yes, very fierce. Oh, and his "Heart of the Warrior" speeches are as tiresome as when I first heard them in the SCA. Similar to the "What is best in life" speech in Conan.The last pitiful element of the writing is that Dick is always right, and EVERYONE else is always wrong. Not only wrong, but in disagreeing with Dick, they also become evil, weak and cowardly. He isn't sophisticated enough to realize that when all your opponents are pussies, victory is not impressive. This is why I quit fencing in the Outlands.I want my time back.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Sam at the other Richard Marcinko is the greatest Navy Seal that ever lived. In his own mind that is.

Book preview

Green Team - Richard Marcinko

ALPHA

The first two floors were easy—no one in sight, no booby traps, and no cats, rats, bats, goats, sheep, or other miscellaneous animals to make our presence known. I crept up the dusty concrete stairs one by one, my black, knee-length Pakistani pasha tunic covering the carbon-colored, custom-suppressed Heckler & Koch USP 9mm in its ballistic nylon thigh holster. The rest of my outfit was also basic black—from the thong sandals to the Maharishi-styled trousers, to the titanium-framed Emerson CQC6 combat folder clipped to my waistband next to the Motorola beeper, to the lead-and-leather sap secured by a thick, black Ace bandage to the inside of my right wrist.

My beard was full—reaching almost halfway down my chest. My mustache drooped Fu Manchu—like way below my upper lip. My shoulder-length hair, restrained by a thick black cotton band, was wild and crazee. If anybody ever looked the part of Islamic fundamentalist rogue warrior—the kind of maniacal mujahideen you used to see on the TV news shows when they sent camera crews into Afghanistan—it was me. Which is precisely why I’d volunteered as point man on this little jaunt, prowling and growling up the unlit stairwell of a Cairo slum at 0-dark-hundred to catch my quarry napping on his bedroll.

I wasn’t alone, of course. You do not meander into Islamic Cairo, home to some of the meanest Muslim fundamentalist sons of bitches in the world, without some fundamentally mean sons of bitches of your own to backstop your ass. That’s why, half a yard behind me, Senior Chief Nasty Nicky Grundle, his suppressed Heckler & Koch MP5K-PDW submachine gun at the ready, rested a huge paw on my shoulder. A yard behind him, Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate Howie Kaluha’s well-muscled Hawaiian back (not to mention his well-maintained Kraut submachine gun) brought up the rear.

A few streets away, cruising in the limo—it was actually a baby blue Peugeot 504 station wagon, but in Cairo, as the saying goes, almost anything that runs can be considered a limo—Doc Tremblay, handle-bar-mustachioed master chief corpsman and supersniper, waited, a Manurhin PPK/s loaded with seven rounds of .380 MagSafe frangible manstoppers tucked in his waistband and a disposable syringe filled with two hundred milligrams of Dr. Nostradamus’s best Ketamine Love Potion Number 9 in his hand. Behind the Peugeot’s wheel sat Grandma Syde’s favorite Peck’s bad boy, Machinist’s Mate First Class Stevie Wonder, on indefinite leave from his classified job at the Washington Navy Yard. Wonder’s carrot-colored hair was covered by a dark, knit fellahin cap, and his tight frame was hidden by a shapeless gallebiyah. He was, however, wearing his trademark wraparound shooting glasses with lenses in the color named especially for him—bastard amber.

Wedged under Wonder’s right thigh was a nineties hush puppy—a suppressed Heckler & Koch 9mm USP semiautomatic—loaded with Doc Tremblay’s best hand-loaded, subsonic hollowpoint. To his nightshirtlike garment was pinned a throwaway receiving device about the size of a pack of gum. When I pressed a Chiclets-sized button in my pocket, his gizmo would vibrate for thirty seconds. The tickle would tell him he had one minute to get his mick ass in gear and pick me and the rest of the team up.

There’s more: while Nasty, Howie, and I crept up the stairs, Chief Gunner’s Mate (Guns) Duck Foot Dewey and Commander Tommy Tanaka were making their way up along a precarious path of irregular stonework, spindly balconies, laundry lines, and drainpipes that ran alongside the target’s third-story dormer windows. I knew it would take every bit of their mountain-climbing expertise to clamber up thirty-five feet of brittle brick without snapping anything off and raising a ruckus.

I know, I know—you’re asking, what the fuck? What the hell’s going on? What’s Dickie doing back in the Third World when he should be home at Rogue Manor, just climbing out of the Jacuzzi clutching a tall, frosted glass of Bombay on the rocks in one hand, and something warm, wonderful, and remarkably full-breasted in the other.

Believe me, if there’d been time, I’d have been asking myself the same question. And as soon as I get a couple of minutes, I’ll tell you everything. But at the present, there was no time for anything but the matter at hand. To wit: scratching and snatching, then whopping and popping.

Translation: our mission was to sit around and scratch our asses until the time was right, then snatch one Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin, Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist asshole, from his beddy-bye. Whereupon, I’d whop him upside the haid with my handy little sap, knock him cold, and hustle his ass down to the Peugeot, where Doc would pop that two hundred milligrams of Dr. N’s Ketamine right into his upper deltoid, which would drug the shit out of ol’ Mahmoud for a few precious hours.

Then we’d spirit the tango Adam Henry (that’s radio talk for terrorist asshole for the uninitiated among you) out of Egypt on a thirty-two-foot fishing trawler Doc had rented in Alexandria, and after a pleasant ocean cruise, we’d rendezvous with a guided-missile frigate that had orders to be standing by, 75 miles off the Egyptian coast during a six-hour window. From the frigate, we’d chopper to a carrier task force that sat another 125 miles out to sea. Then we’d use a Grumman C-2 Greyhound carrier onboard delivery plane to COD us all to Sigonella, Sicily.

There, we’d quietly slip Azziz aboard his own C-141 StarLifter aircraft and fly him back to CONUS (or the CONtinental United States in civilian speak), where we’d drop him off in such plain sight that even the FBI would be able to find him. We would then disappear back into the shadows from which we’d come, leaving the feds to take all the capture credit when Azziz finally stood trial for his lethal part in a series of bombings across the United States that had cost sixty-five lives in all and disrupted the cities of New York, Chicago, Houston, and Washington, D.C., for more than a month.

Sounds easy. A clockwork op. Guess again. Snatch-and-grabs (or, as the Brits call ’em, cosh-and-carrys) are precarious, risky operations. Probs and stats? Bad. Goatfuck likelihood? High.

GF factor 1: you’re operating in a hostile environment with no back-up.

GF factor 2: your government will disavow your actions if you’re caught.

GF factor 3: if the locals do get their hands on you, the odds are that you’ll end up being dragged behind a car or truck for a few hours while they cut off significant pieces of your anatomy joint by joint.

So, you ask, how did I feel right now?

Brief answer: I felt as happy as un grand porc en merde, although you probably couldn’t get something the width of a hairpin up my sphincter because the pucker factor was off the charts.

Above me, something moved. My hand went up. We stopped. I gave signals, and Nasty pressed himself against the stairwell wall, giving himself the greatest field of fire. His free hand grasped my shoulder. That way I’d know where he was all the time. Knowing where everybody is all the time is an important element of operations such as these. It’s altogether possible to kill your own man if he’s out of position by as much as a few inches. I know—because it has happened during training.

I kept moving in the same steady pace I’d set two floors below, progressing inch by inch, the fingers of my left hand sweeping carefully, caressing the stair treads and risers as carefully as if they were virgin pussy. These fundamentalist assholes were SUCs—smart, unpredictable, and cunning. And they fucking owned this part of town—even government troops stayed away from this particular neighborhood unless they were being deployed by the hundreds.

We’d learned this fact—and others—during the past week and a half as we’d begun the deadly business of target assessment. We’d infiltrated commercially. Nasty Nick, Tommy, and I came through Rome, Messina, and Cyprus, catching a ferry from there to Port Said and busing the dusty road from Ismailia to Cairo eleven days ago. Howie, Duck Foot, and Wonder came commercial—TWA from Dulles to Frankfurt, a change of planes for the hop to Athens, then southeast over the Med to Cairo. They arrived eight days ago.

Doc Tremblay’d had the toughest commute. He had had to come through Cairo traffic from his house in Maadi, six miles from Tahrir Square in central Cairo. Doc was on a two-year assignment here. You don’t want to know what he was doing, or who he was doing it for—because if he told you, he’d have to kill you. Anyway, glutton for punishment that he is, he’d volunteered to come along for the ride when I’d called him on the secure line and told him we’d be visiting.

That was a-okay with me. I always like to have a mole—a covert operator no one knows about—to wheel and deal for me. So, Doc took some accumulated leave and disappeared from the Military Assistance Group offices. He told the embassy people he was taking vacation time in Alexandria, Suez, and Ismailia. Instead, he’d slipped into Cairo’s back alleys, and by the time Nick, Tommy, and I arrived here, he’d assembled weapons, ordnance, bought a junker Peugeot and a pair of half-decent motorbikes, and arranged rooms at a local tourist hotel. All, I might add, without alerting the Egyptian secret police, the local Christians in Action station—Navy talk for CIA agents—or the State Department’s Foggy Bottomed apparatchiki.

Once we’d arrived and set up shop, it hadn’t taken us long to locate Azziz. Why? First, because we already knew where he lived. The Defense Intelligence Agency—DIA—had provided my boss, the chief of naval operations, with a detailed map of the area. And second, because, as cops are fond of saying, a perp is a perp is a perp (actually, cops say that everywhere but New York, where they say a poip is a poip is a poip). Translated into English, that means perpetrators are creatures of habit. And Azziz the perp’s habits were centered around politics and prayer.

Moreover, Azziz enjoyed a certain celebrity status on the local fundamentalist scene. No matter how low he may have wanted to keep his profile, the local mullahs singled him out, citing ol’ Mahmoud as an example of righteous dedication to Islam’s cause. He had defied the infidel. He had waged war against the Great Satan on the Great Satan’s turf—and he’d won. So they showed him off. They displayed him at their rallies. They stood him at attention during their sermons.

So, finding our Muslim needle wasn’t going to be hard—not in this here haystack. The challenge would be to snatch him up without creating a ruckus, in the same sort of low-key, quick-and-dirty kidnap operation I’d perfected more than a quarter century ago in Vietnam.

We called them parakeet ops back then. We’d take four or five guys and hit a village, nabbing a VC paymaster or political cadre out of his hooch in the middle of the night with such quiet efficiency that the people in the adjacent hooch wouldn’t hear a thing. They’d wake up the next morning, and Binh or Phuong or Tran would just have di-di maued—that’s disappeared in Vietnamese slang. His bodyguards would still be there—dead, of course, and nicely, cunningly, lethally boobytrapped. It was unnerving. It was intimidating. It was wonderful.

Parakeet ops took split-second timing. They also took good operational intelligence—you had to know how, and where, the bird lived before you could snare him.

So, when Doc had showed me the latest Cairo Weekly—a newsletter published by the embassy’s personnel office—and I read the listing titled Security Advisory, which said, quote, AMEMB [translation: AMerican EMBassy] personnel should avoid the areas adjacent to the Rifai, Saiyida Sukayna, and al-Hambra mosques next Wednesday—five days hence—as DIPSEC [translation: Diplomatic SECurity] has been advised that Islamic rallies have been planned, a hundred-watt lightbulb went off in my thick-as-rocks Slovak skull.

All three mosques were in the general area where Azziz’s family lived—the southern section of Islamic Cairo adjacent to the City of the Dead and below the Citadel. Odds were that Azziz would be featured at one or more of the rallies.

My plan was KISS simple. Duck Foot and Howie would surveil one mosque, Wonder and Nasty would cover the other, and I’d handle the third with Tommy. We knew what Azziz looked like—his red hair and broken nose made him easily distinguishable. We’d shadow him at a discreet distance, check out the opposition, see what patterns he established, and once we could be reasonably certain of them, we’d go in and grab his ass. DIA’s locals had no need to know we were in the city—which would protect their butts, bureaucratically, and our asses on the operational level.

I’d done time in Cairo back in the late eighties and was familiar with the city. It’s not an easy place to learn. There are thousands of unpaved streets and muddy alleyways that run together in labyrinthine mazes. There are cul-de-sacs from which it’s impossible to escape. There’s the City of the Dead—six square miles of cemeteries turned slums, where more than half a million people live in mausoleums and mud-hut shanties with open-trench sewers.

Doc Tremblay, whose passion is shopping, knew it like the back of his hairy fucking hand. But my youngsters had never been here before. I knew they’d have to get the feel of the place before they felt confident operating with the split-second timing the mission required.

There’s a philosophical point about clandestine operations I should mention at this juncture. It is that you can’t send a SEAL off to Cairo, Kabul, or Kinshasa and say, Just do it. SEALs have to be able to blend in. Just as we learned how to use camouflage in Vietnam to render ourselves invisible to Mr. Charlie, you have to be able to hide in plain sight when you’re in an urban jungle, too.

One thing that often helps immeasurably is the ability not to sound like a Yankee. Me? I speak French and Italian and get along in gutter Arabic, Spanish, and German. Tommy T is fluent in French, German, and Russian. Howie’s Spanish is better than his English. Nasty Nick and Wonder hablan español, too. Duck Foot can pass as Polish if he has to. He reads Arabic better than he speaks it, however. Doc Tremblay? His Arabic’s fluent, his Farsi’s passable, and his French? Superbe. Those linguistic abilities are what help make them dependable shooters overseas.

You send someone sounding like an American farm boy out in the Azerbaijani boondocks, and he’s gonna stick out like a sore szeb. That will compromise your mission. Then there’s the operational gestalt. You have to be able to blend in—whether it means passing as a tourist or a truck driver. If you read like US GOVT ISSUE, you’ll probably be deadmeat body-bag material before you get to shoot or loot.

So the boys and I spent the next four days playing our own brand of tourist—familiarizing ourselves with the warp and weave of this huge, gawky city. We’d started at the trio of mosques where Azziz was likely to make his appearance. All three sat in the shadow of the Citadel—the fortified complex built by Salah al-Din in the twelfth century. The Citadel still dominates Cairo’s skyline, accented by tin mosque domes that reflect the sunlight and a series of needlelike minarets that look skyward like ready-to-launch SAM-7 missiles.

Each two-man team, dressed like tourists and equipped with the requisite cameras, guidebooks, and maps, worked outward through concentric circles, charting alleyways and narrow passages, making mental notes about the decrepit three- and four-story apartment houses that sat cheek-to-jowl on narrow streets, laundry fluttering like flags from shuttered windows and shaky balcony railings.

Nasty and Duck Foot (and their sweet teeth) hit the neighborhood teahouses. They sat at window tables, Duck Foot tried his Polish on the waiters, and they maintained cover by sampling dozens of honey-covered cakes. Tommy and Howie wandered the Khan al-Khalil—Cairo’s huge market district—munching grilled meat wrapped in hot Arab bread, seasoned with fiery green pepper and chopped onion and sold by voluble street vendors dressed in the kind of sweat-suit pajamas common to backstreet Cairo. (Whether the kabobs were cat or rat they couldn’t tell, but they’re snake eaters, so what difference would it make anyway?)

Wonder, Doc, and I poked our noses inside small grocery stores, reveling in the pervasive smells of cardamom, cumin, allspice, and cinnamon. I tried my backstreet Arabic and was gratified to discover I could still make myself understood. Doc Tremblay, whom I first met back in Naples when he was a second-class corpsman in search of a good time and I was working for the legendary Frogman Everett E. Barrett, chief gunner’s mate/guns, at UDT-22, was positively loquacious, much to the delight of the natives. Doc reminds me of Jim Finley, my utility man from Bravo Squad, Second Platoon, in Vietnam. We called Jim the Mayor, because no matter where we went, he’d be out pressing the flesh, making friends, within minutes of our arrival. Doc’s much the same—he’s the kind of guy who looks like he just belongs, whether he’s in Chicago, Cairo, or Kathmandu.

While the rest of the men learned the streets, Doc and I worked out escape routes, logging hundreds of miles—at least it felt that way—bouncing along in the decrepit station wagon he’d bought. We should have used the motor bikes, because the rusty, dented Peugeot was a joke. I’d told Doc I wanted something that could pass for a Cairene’s car—and did I ever get it. The damn thing kept crapping out on us no matter how Stevie Wonder played with its innards.

We finally pulled it off the pavement and into a quiet alley behind our hotel. Once and for all, fix the damn thing, I told Stevie. He’d saluted me with his middle finger and gave me a confident Yes, sir.

That had been on Tuesday. The next day, Tommy T and Duck Foot sighted our quarry coming out the back of the Sidi Almas mosque just north of Saleh ed-Din Square.

Azziz, they said, was flanked by a pair of bodyguards who looked as if they were packing heat. Azziz was in deep conversation with a huge black guy—could have been Sudanese or Somali, but they’d dubbed him the Nubian—dressed in flowing robes and cowboy boots. The quartet had climbed into a huge Mercedes limo with biacked-out windows and driven to a coffeehouse, where the Nubian and Azziz sat for two hours in deep conversation, while the bodyguards waited just outside the doorway.

Tommy and Duck Foot gave them a loose tail when they left. Azziz was dropped right here at his apartment house. He was patting his pocket as he got out of the car, which told Duck Foot he’d been given something valuable—perhaps documentation or money, or both. Tommy stayed with Azziz, watching as he and his shadows climbed the three flights of stairs to his flat.

Duck Foot followed the Mercedes, which wove its way downtown, finally pulling up on the long driveway to the Cairo Meridien. The Nubian disembarked there. Duck Foot, ever patient, walked into the lobby and plunked himself down at the bar, watching as the Nubian took the elevator to the sixth floor. Six minutes later, the tall black man reappeared, now dressed in a fashionable Western suit and carrying an overnight bag. He paid his bill in cash, tipped the concierge handsomely, and climbed back into the Mercedes, which Duck Foot followed out to the airport.

I’d listened to their report and immediately initiated a twenty-four-hour stakeout at Azziz’s apartment. I had Duck Foot shinny up the power pole that also held the phone line and drop a passive device in place. We couldn’t overhear Azziz’s conversations, but we knew he was making lots of overseas calls from the number of blips we heard as he dialed. Moreover, as soon as the Nubian had departed, Azziz started to receive a continuous stream of visitors.

The signs told me Azziz was about to skedaddle. We had to move first—even though we weren’t as ready as I might have wanted us to be. So, I faced Rome, Jerusalem, and Mecca and prayed to every deity I could think of. I even made the old religious sign the priests had taught me when I was an altar boy: spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch. Please, sir—I prayed to the Deity—let the fucking car work.

The chain of events that had led me to this current and potentially precarious circumstance had actually begun roughly six months ago, when the feds grabbed Mahmoud in a grocery store in Brooklyn and charged him with being the ringleader of an alleged tango group that had pulled off six separate bombings all across the U.S. Usually in these cases, the accused is defended either by a William Kunstlerlike rad-chic, or a public defender.

Not so in Azziz’s case. The thirty-five-year-old Egyptian national who had no visible means of support was somehow suddenly represented in court by one of New York’s most prestigious Wall Street firms, whose $1,000-an-hour attorneys used the old-boy network to select the most liberal federal judge currently serving on the bench to preside at the arraignment.

After half an hour of May we approach the bench, Your Honor legalese double-talk and triple syllables, Let-’em-Loose Bruce allowed young Mahmoud to take a walk on $5-million bail, which the lawyer produced immediately—in cash. And, of course, not three hours after the Most Happy Fellah sauntered out of the Federal Detention Center in lower Manhattan, he’d forfeited the money by climbing on a plane to his hometown, Cairo, using a false passport that he’d somehow (?!?) obtained.

And why not? Azziz (and those azzisting him) knew all too well that the United States had neither the will nor the balls to bring him to justice from overseas. He also understood (given the tenuous political situation here in the land of the pharaohs) that the Egyptians, nervous over the intensifying influence of homespun Islamic fundamentalism, would turn a blind eye to his return and leave him alone unless he committed some heinous act of domestic aggression.

Heinous act? you say. You want an example? Okay—gang-banging the Egyptian president’s wife and daughter at the Giza pyramids at high noon would probably (although by no means certainly) prompt the local authorities to take a closer look at Azziz and his activities. It would take something more serious than that to make them actually act.

In fact, the Egyptian foreign minister, a Turhan Bey look-alike if ever there was one, had only three weeks ago oozed over to the American embassy in dramatic response to a vapid State Department démarche on said tango’s whereabouts and personally assured G. Throckmorton Numbnuts Jr., or whatever our current ambassador’s name is, that Mahmoud Azziz abu Yasin was nowhere in Egypt. He had personally looked into the matter, and said conclusion was the result of his investigation.

Of course Ambassador Numbnuts Jr., a heel-rocking, change-jingling, striped-suited, no-load pencil-dicked Foggy Bottomed foreign-service diplo-dink cookie pusher, who believes in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and Barney, took him at his word.

Sure. Right. Absolument. Just the way the same Foreign Ministry swore back in October 1985 that the Palestine Liberation Front Achille Lauro terrorists who’d murdered wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer had left the country, when in fact they were still safely holed up in a four-star hotel just outside the Cairo International Airport perimeter fence, drinking mint-fucking-infused tea, eating honey-and-nut fucking baklawa, and waiting for their first-fucking-class Egyptair flight back to Tripoli.

We at DOD, of course, knew better. But the Department of Defense doesn’t write démarches—not in this administration at least. So the State Department performed as usual: the Foggy Bottom apparatchiki held long meetings, wrote internal memos to the file, wrung their hands, and finally resolved to do—absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, Ambassador Numbnuts Jr. sat at his Texas Instruments laptop and composed directives forbidding his political officers, mil-group advisers, or rezident intel gumshoes from scouring the streets in search of the missing MIQ, or Muslim-In-Question.

We do not, he opined in bits and bytes on embassy letterhead, wish to offend our generous Egyptian hosts by appearing to doubt their good word.

Unfuckingbelievable, right? Well, I know he wrote it, because I’ve seen the goddamn thing.

But not everything at AMEMB/CAIRO was a total clusterfuck. Under quiet orders from an anonymous, modern, fourteen-story building in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington, Defense Intelligence Agency assets (they’re called assets in the trade because you sets dey asses on de street) were told to keep loose tabs on our man Mahmoud from the time he stepped off the plane from Frankfurt into his Muslim mummy’s loving arms. They did their jobs successfully.

They backchanneled their data to headquarters by sending it via courier, not cable or telephone, because they knew there’s not a single fucking communication posted from an embassy—not a secure fax, not a scrambled phone call, not even a goddamn code-word secret CIA cable—that an ambassador can’t get a copy, tape, or transcript of, if he so desires.

Anyway, DIA’s intel nuggets caromed around the chain of command until they reached Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Secrest’s antique walnut desk on the fourth-floor E-ring of the Pentagon. CNO, one of the few admirals these days who can actually be designated a warrior, not a manager or a technocrat, decided it was time to do something militant and military. He lobbied his fellow service chiefs, stroked SECDEF—that’s the SECretary of DEFense—and wheedled, needled, and diddled the folks at CIA until they all saw things his way.

When the ducks finally came up in a row, he picked up the phone and called my extension.

Two weeks after that, me and my guys were on our way here. We’d paid for our tickets with the counterfeit credit cards and traveled on the ersatz Irish, German, British, U.S., and Canadian passports we’d received from a USG—that’s U.S. Government—employee I’ll call Freddie the Forger, whose very classified shop sits in plain sight about a thousand feet from the State Department’s main entrance.

Freddie’s a gem. He looks like Bob Dylan, circa 1967, and he only takes a shower once a month or so. Who cares—his work is perfect, and his documents are all genuine and up-to-date. There’s not an ultraviolet scanner, magnetic-strip decoder, or bar-code reader in the world that can tell one of Freddie’s IDs, passports, credit cards, or driver’s licenses from the real McCoy—until the bills come in and nobody pays ’em.

Still, we needed the best documentation we could get. After all, I had personal orders from CNO to maintain, as he put it to me in technical language, a completely Stealth fucking profile.

I understood all too well the reasons for CNO’s stricture. First and foremost was the Egyptian government, which frowns on foreign military operations conducted on its sovereign soil. Second was our own American ambassador and his superiors at State, most of whom frown on American military operations, period.

But while CNO, a man I have come to like and respect, warned me to be discreet, he also ordered me to get the goddamn job done. Dick—do not fail to bring this bastard back is what he said in his booming foghorn basso.

CNO’s choice of phrase struck a chord deep within my soul. He used virtually the same words as another CNO I respected, Admiral Black Jack Morrison.

Dick, you will not fail, was what Black Jack said the day he’d ordered me to design, build, equip, train, and lead the most effective and highly secret counterterror force in the world, SEAL Team Six.

Of course the world was simple in those days. There were the good guys—us, our allies, and our surrogates—and there were the bad guys—the Soviet Bear, its allies, and its surrogates. Yin and yang. Black and white. Us or them.

Yesterday’s villains were known quantities. Today’s bad guys are faceless assholes like Azziz; members of self-contained cells, or loners who say they represent some fragment of the underclass. Most often, we have no idea who they are, how they operate, or what their targets are going to be. What worried CNO and me even more was the possibility that half a dozen groups of these tangos would coalesce—form a loose syndicate and operate in concert. That would make them PDMPs—Pretty Dangerous Motherfucking People indeed.

Except, the only people who seemed to appreciate this nasty factoid were CNO and me. This, after all, was the nineties—when Americans turned inward. The polls all showed it, too. Crime. Health care. Welfare reform. Those were the popular problems to be concerned about, and the White House, which was ruled by pollsters, followed the public lead. Americans, they’d decided, couldn’t care less what was going on in places whose names they couldn’t pronounce.

And yet, CNO and I knew that what happened in those corners of the world was going to affect us in a big way. All those KGB and GRU veterans for hire. All those old Soviet nukes and chemical/biological warfare canisters. All those guns and bullets, grenades, land mines, rocket-propelled grenades, plastic explosives, and shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles—all just waiting to be used against us.

So we waged our own unconventional little war. CNO did covert combat on the Pentagon’s E-ring, where the service chiefs have their offices. He skirmished at meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He staged hit-and-run strikes during day-long strategy sessions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He left behind philosophical time bombs during visits with the White House national security adviser.

On the overt side, he dropped tactical tidbits to half a dozen favored reporters and hammered the subject in all of his public appearances. He made quite a name for himself on the TV talk shows—volubly promoting the right to pursue those who murder Americans if they take flight overseas and return them to justice here, and defending the concept of counterterror—which means doing it to them before they do it to us. And every now and then, when he won his battles on the home front, I got to fight mine in places like this.

Today’s mission, for example, had been approved in the Oval Office, by the Leader of the Free World himself. Seventy-two hours before we’d gone wheels up, I was snuck into the White House through the East Wing, looking like one of the first family’s Hollywood friends—I wore Reeboks, blue jeans, and a chambray shirt, my long hair tucked under a po’ boy cap. CNO arrived through the West Wing basement entrance in a dark suit. We linked up in the NSC adviser’s office and went the roundabout route to meet the commander in chief.

It was obvious the president wasn’t happy about my mission. But CNO had worked him over pretty good. He’d explained that any indigent tango who could throw away $5 million cash in bail money and spend a grand per hour on lawyers was worth going after, if only to find out who was funding him.

More to the point—i.e., politically—he convinced the president that the only way to deter this particular genus of terrorists was to take the sort of explicitly violent, yet deniably clandestine action, which would force them to reconsider further acts of aggression within our borders. And he wasn’t about to let the president weasel out of it now: If they perceive you as indecisive or weak, Mr. President, they’ll only hit us again, CNO insisted. That could jeopardize your reelection substantially. Indeed, he gently reminded the president that virtually every foreign-intelligence profile we’d intercepted, from both allies and adversaries, made the point that the leader of the free world had been a Vietnam War protester and was probably inherently resistant to using force.

The president asked for my opinion. I told him I concurred with my boss. I added that we somehow had to show the Egyptians that they couldn’t lie to us about harboring terrorists—but that we couldn’t do it overtly.

The president nodded in agreement. He may have not had a military molecule in his body, but he was 100 percent a political animal. Instinctively, he knew there was no way we could allow a country receiving almost $3 billion in American aid to provide terrorists with a safe haven. But isn’t there a less, ah, brutal way of convincing them, Captain?

I was about to use the dreaded F-word when I saw the look in CNO’s eye. I bit my tongue. No, sir. No way at all.

The president sighed. I still don’t like it, Admiral Secrest. But I’m gonna bow to your wisdom—and my wife’s. She insists we have to act decisively.

It was nice to hear that someone in the White House actually has balls.

So the supreme CINC gave us his blessing, although he refused to sign a national-security finding in the matter. Well, I could see his point. It’s not the kind of mission where you want to leave a paper trail. In fact, the political aspects of this assignment were lose/lose, so far as CNO and I were concerned. If I screwed up, the White House would jettison CNO—maybe even court-martial him. If I succeeded, only CNO and the president would know what I’d done. There were no medals in this for me or my men, only the knowledge that we were doing what we were born to do, for the country we loved so much.

CNO and I left together, hustling out the West Wing into his car. We rode back to the Pentagon in silence. There’s a term for what CNO had just done. It’s called leading from the front.

I admire and respect an officer who takes the same risks as his men—and while CNO wasn’t coming with us, his ass was on the line no less than mine was. So my response to him was the same as it had been to Black Jack Morrison back in 1980.

No way would I fail. Aye, aye, sir, I said.

My fingers discovered something—a single strand of monofilament ran six inches above the stair tread, attached to the wall on one side and threaded through the filigree iron railing on the other. I drew the line in carefully. It was attached to a series of small, empty tin cans. What I’d discovered was the same sort of simple, effective intrusion device I’d first seen used in Vietnam. Some big-footed American trips the wire, the cans go clank-clank, and Mr. Charlie shoots you dead before you know what’s happened.

The hair on my neck stood up. If there was one, there’ll be another. These things always ran in pairs—or even triples. I stopped to let my fingers do the walking.

Bingo—monofilament number two was three steps above number one. And wire number three ran at chest level, two feet above that.

Each had to be disposed of. First, I made sure Nasty and Howie knew what, when, where, and how. Then I flipped the Emerson out of my waistband, and as Nasty took the cans into his big hands one by one, I clipped the line. Then we set them all on the landing below us. We repeated the sequence for the next two without incident.

Two apartments were on the third floor. From our surveillance, I knew Azziz lived with his mother and younger brother behind door number one—the one on the left that looked out on the back alley. Across the hallway were the bodyguards. Two at a time they accompanied Azziz whenever he left the house.

We had two options: the first was to break in and do our job without alerting the watchdogs. The second involved breaking into both apartments simultaneously, allowing Howie to wax the bodyguards while Nasty, Tommy, Duck Foot, and I silenced Mom and baby bro, grabbed Azziz, and skipped. I preferred option number one.

Inshallah, it was not to be.

The ever present Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame had accompanied us on this little adventure. As I came up to the third-floor landing, the right-hand door opened, spilling light down the stairwell. A shaggy-haired kid in sweats peered out, his face quizzical.

I froze, hoping he wouldn’t see me.

The expression in his eyes said otherwise. Nasty didn’t wait to be coaxed—a quiet brrp from his HK and a three-round burst took the kid down before he could react. You could hear the hollowpoint, frangible rounds impact, cracking bone and cartilage in the tango’s chest.

I bolted the last two yards and caught him before he hit the ground, took him by the shoulders, and dragged the body out onto the landing. Howie moved into the bodyguards’ flat, his HK in close-quarters-battle ready mode, his round, brown face impassive. He knew what he had to do.

Nasty and I took the left-hand door. I hit it hard enough with my foot to pop it off the hinges.

Inside. I went left. Nasty went right. There was motion at the window in front of me—Duck Foot and Tommy T coming through the shutters, right on the busted-door cue. From somewhere, a woman screamed—the cry was cut off.

Now it was all moving so fast that things happened in flash-time sequence. I hit the left-side bedroom door. Azziz rolled over, grabbing for something under the mattress. Fuck you— I wrestled his hand from under the mattress, breaking a finger or two in the process, and slid the pistol he’d been trying for out of reach. Then I swatted him back against the wall, covered him with my body, and applied a liberal helping of leather sap behind his ear. He went spongy.

I grabbed the roll of surgical tape in my pocket; Tommy already had his out. We trussed Azziz’s hands and feet quicker than any cowpokes ever hog-tied a dogie, then flipped him onto the floor, facedown.

We did a quick sweep of the room. I turned the mattress. There was a pistol there. And a heavy, thick, brown envelope. I grabbed it and looked inside—it was stuffed with English fifty-pound notes and a few documents. It went into my big inside pocket. Then I plucked the tango from the floor and threw him over my shoulder. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge. Go-go-go.

Tommy bolted toward the landing. I followed him, my left hand fumbling for the transmitter in my pocket. I finally got it, squeezed it hard, and—smaaaack—caught the edge of the bedroom door right in the middle of my forehead at full speed. I bounced backward, Azziz’s weight pulling me off my feet. His head hit the floor with a thunk as I sat down hard, stunned. Bad juju, Dickie.

Skipper, Skipper? Tommy wheeled, grabbed my arm, and pulled me to my feet.

"What?

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1